The classical language of architecture by John Summerson(
Book
)7
editions published
between
1981
and
1997
in
French
and held by
122 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
"Scripts of six talks, written for the B.B.C. and delivered in May-July 1963."

Image on the edge : the margins of medieval art by Michael Camille(
Book
)5
editions published
in
1997
in
French
and held by
93 WorldCat member
libraries
worldwide
A gargoyle lurks at the corner of a Gothic cathedral. A monstrous face peers from the margin of a medieval text. At the far
reaches of cultural spaces a chorus of odd and arresting figures assembles, commenting endlessly on the world it surveys.
What these characters are doing at the margins is the subject of Michael Camille's new book, an exhilarating account of the
medieval imagination testing--and defining--its boundaries. Where others have isolated the marginal image as a detail, Camille
considers such marginalia in direct and complex relation to the whole work. Ranging with graceful authority through the culture
of the Middle Ages, from art to architecture, music to illustrated manuscripts, courtly romances to social rituals, he finds
in the margins a distorted yet apt reflection of medieval conventions. It is here at the edge--of the monastery, the cathedral,
the court, the city--that medieval artists found room for experimentation, for glossing, parodying, modernizing, and questioning
cultural authority without ever undermining it. Viewing marginalia in their proper social and cultural context, Camille reveals
scandalous and subversive aspects, as well as apparently paradoxical stabilizing functions. He rejects oppositions such as
high and low, profane and sacred, and instead projects a vision of medieval culture in which marginal resistance, inversion,
and transgression play an integral, even necessary, role. Chimeras as disruptions of religious order; gargoyles as embodiments
of fears and temptations; scatological drawings as manifestations of crisis in the chivalric class; charivari as ritual reinscriptions
of social norms: Image on the Edge presents a vivid picture of a medieval world in which contradictions were not only tolerated,
but worked with exquisite detail into the very fabric of society. With a richness of expression in keeping with his subject--and
with a wealth of sumptuous illustrations--Camille illuminates these details; in doing so, he revises and enhances our understanding
of medieval culture's self-representation